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Expert Reference Series of White Papers
Cloud Computing: What It Is and
What It Can Do for You
[email protected]
Cloud Computing: What It Is and
What It Can Do for You
Steve Baca, Global Knowledge Instructor
Introduction
Cloud computing is one of the latest computer and business industry buzz words. It
joins the ranks of virtualisation, grid computing, clustering, among others to know in
the IT industry. The problem is, that depending on your point of view, the definition
of cloud computing can be quite different. Depending on you perspective, you could
look at it from a business point of view or an application point of view, as well as
others. This has created confusion on the definition and a fuzzy view as to what cloud
computing is or even does.
The term cloud computing is overused and ill-defined, which has lead many IT
professionals and management to make assumptions as to what cloud computing does
and how their company can best utilise it. The IT Industry is not making it easier for
their customers by offering many different definitions and products that only create
confusion. This confusion is what the IT vendors are utilising to create many different
products and call them “cloud products.” Examples of this behavior can be seen by
watching television ads that are being broadcast to everyone, not just IT professionals
and management. One large IT company defines cloud computing in a way that
only a person with a PhD. in linguistics and computer science could understand, but
the ad tells you they are making a simple definition, and if you do not understand
their definition then call up their professional services to “help” your company take
advantage of “cloud computing.” This ad, as well as other marketing, makes the idea
so complex that no one understands it, and this only makes cloud computing more of a
“riddle wrapped in an enigma.”
The cloud is a great marketing term, with lots of hype behind it. This white paper is
going to define cloud computing using a commonly accepted definition to get past the
hype. Then it will discuss the different types of cloud computing, which also has added
to the confusion as to what cloud computing is and does. Finally, we will end with
ideas on how you can begin to implement the cloud in your environment.
The term cloud, which is a familiar computer cliché that every computer networking
professional has used as the “public internet” in a network design at one time or
another, is a great place to start. The internet cloud is drawn into the network design
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as the part of the network that is not controlled by the company. However, the
internet cloud is needed in order to get the data or information from the company to
the customer, so the cloud represents the unknown path between the company and the
customer.
For the IT professional, this is a well understood concept and has been an acceptable
practice for many years. In addition, the internet cloud design has been shown to
management over the years, and they also have a comfort level with the design and
the concept. Now IT professionals do have a common knowledge of the internet cloud;
however, if you combine cloud with computing, the definition becomes fuzzy, and
there is no single acceptable meaning. If the concept comes up in a meeting, it begins
to remind you of the story of the Emperor has no clothes. No one wants to admit
that they do not know exactly what cloud computing is, and this is why, many years
ago, the industry developed Request For Comments (RFC). The RFCs were designed to
standardize computer concepts. By standardising, computers and the internet were
able to grow quickly, because companies had to abide by the RFC. This standardisation
made it easy for the producer and the consumer to avoid confusion on what was
being produced and consumed. However, there are no RFCs for cloud computing,
which creates confusion as to what should or must be done to implement it. Without
standardisation, the producer and consumer are left to write their own rules and make
their own definitions.
Definition of Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing can be broadly defined as several different methods to deliver
information or services to customers who pay for what they use. Thus, it is a new
mechanism to deliver products from a producer to a consumer. Of course, what has
not changed is that we have a consumer that wants or needs to utilise information.
Who is the customer? Well, the customer can be an external person who is paying
for a service or information. The customer could also be an internal customer, such as
the application owner who is using services that another department within the same
company is offering, but is being charged for consumption.
Part of the confusion in cloud computing is that there are two completely different
customers for two different types of clouds. One type of cloud the customer gets
their information and services externally (public cloud) and the other type gets theirs
internally (private cloud). With the public cloud, the customer owns no storage or
server and has no capital expenditures; they simply want to buy what they need on
demand. The other customer is an internal customer so the company spends capital
to either provide services and data internally, or spends capital to provide the servers,
storage, networking, and applications (capital spending) for an external customer.
In addition, there are many different ways to use the cloud. Take the point-of-view of
the producer. The producer can be an internal department offering services, which is
called a private cloud. The producer can also be an external company that is supplying
a server, storage, rack space, and electricity, and essentially supplies the capital for the
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information or service, and is called a public cloud. As an example, let’s say that I am a
product manager, and I have an application that I want to put into production. What
do I need to put together to roll out this product? Well, I need to find a server and
storage for the data. I also need to find rack space for the server, and I need electricity,
to name the big items. Basically, a capital investment is made to put my application
into production in my company’s data center.
With an external (public) cloud I do not do any of these things; someone else builds the
space and provides the capital investment. Thus, a new way of doing business where
the customer buys on demand, and the supplier charges them for what they use. This
concept is similar to cable television on demand, I only pay for the movies that I want
to watch. At issue is in the details of providing the data to the users, and securing
that data. In addition, there are new methodologies and, how much control over the
data the company maintains are just some of the issues with cloud computing. Also,
where is the data maintained and how secure is it. Cloud computing is a new way of
doing business that takes advantage of building efficiencies into the system that can
scale out to provide services for multiple companies. As an example, you drive down
to your pharmacy to fill a drug prescription. You hand the pharmacist the prescription
and it gets put into the cloud. Your personal and financial information is checked with
your insurance company. The prescription is checked for drug interactions with other
medications you are taking. The prescription is checked against a database of generic
drugs. During this whole process which is running in computer time, your data has to
remain secure. So how did we get to this type of cloud interaction, lets take a look at
the past.
Cloud Evolution
The evolution of cloud computing can be traced to grid computing. The concept of
“The Grid” exploded in popularity after a book called “The Grid: Blueprint for a new
Computing Infrastructure” by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman was published in 1998.
The basis of the grid is the electric utility grid that provides electric power to your home
and business. Using the same concept, hardware and software would be provided from
the grid on-demand much like electricity to run lights and everything else that plugs
into the wall. What is interesting is that many of the same issues that plagued the grid
also plague cloud computing. Some of the problems were defining the grid, vendor
lock-in, and forming standards were just some of the issues. Cloud computing expands
upon the grid, but still suffers from some of the same issues. Taking the grid a step
further is the cloud.
Let’s look at the different types of cloud computing that are available. I have organised
the different types into two main categories. The first types I will call Private or Internal
clouds and the second type Public or External clouds. Within these two main categories
I can than sub-divide them further.
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Public Cloud or External Cloud
A public cloud is where resources, such as storage and applications, are made available
over the internet by a third-party provider. The service is typically low cost or pay on
demand for what you utilise. The resources are located at an off-site location that is
controlled by the third-party, and accessed by the customer via a web application or
web service over the Internet. The term outsourcing is commonly used for this type of
cloud computing. Several of the major players and the public cloud product they have
to offer: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google App
Engine, Amazon Web Services, and Force.com.
These consumer portals such as yahoo email are nice for the mass market. I can get my
email from anywhere in the world, at a very low cost. I rely upon yahoo to provide and
store my email, which is an application that is used in the public cloud. This is a classic
example of a public cloud, because I rely upon another company to provide the capital
expense to maintain my data. There are questions on reliability and the security of my
data.
The type of outsourcing provided by yahoo and other vendors is termed “public
cloud” to differentiate it from an application that an organisation has more control
over and is managed by the organisation itself locally which is termed “private cloud”.
Basically, the “public cloud” provider is making the capital investment, as opposed to a
“private cloud” in which the company internally makes the capital investment for the
infrastructure. Therefore, when a company is thinking about whether to use a public
or private cloud, the company is making a decision on whether or not to outsource
the capital expense. Also, the company has to get the security right, as well as the SLA
contract as to who owes who money. So what does the company want to outsource,
and what does the company want to do in-house.
Private Cloud or Internal Cloud
A private cloud is where the data is stored and accessed by a limited number of users
in the companies own datacenter behind a firewall. The Private Cloud has all of the
benefits of the Public Clouds but it is hosted inside the firewall of the company or
department it is supporting. The future of corporate IT is in private clouds, which are
modeled after public clouds. One of the important features is that a private cloud
can allow both internal and external consumers the ability to access data in a secure
local environment, which differentiates a private cloud from a public cloud. Advances
in virtualisation and distributed computing have allowed corporate networking
and datacenter administrators to become service providers that meet the needs of
consumers within the corporation. The ability to provide a low cost, convenient, and
flexible access to data is a benefit to cloud computing. Data that you are responsible
for such as financial records and customer records will stay in the internal cloud in
the data center, but other parts of the data might be stored elsewhere with the
flexibility of moving wherever needed. You could define a private cloud as servers plus
virtualisation plus applications.
Virtualisation is the underlying technology enabling cloud computing and transforming
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the face of the modern data center. Virtualisation is one of the keys to cloud
computing with a hypervisor such as VMware’s vSphere leading the virtualisation
market. In essence, a new type of operating system known as a Virtual Datacenter
Operating System (VDC-OS) is what some are calling vSphere. A software layer that
aggregates virtualised servers, storage and network resources into one big computing
pool that can be used by virtual machines within the datacenter. So really a private
cloud from VMware’s point of view is really a hybrid of internal and external clouds to
interoperate.
Using Cloud Computing in your Environment
One of the initial steps toward cloud computing is incorporating virtualisation, which is
separating the hardware from the software. In the past, transitions of this magnitude
meant rewriting code, such as the transition from the mainframe to unix. Fortunately,
the transition to VMware does not require the rewrite of code, which has fueled the
speed of the move toward virtualisation software. There still will be challenges in this
transition, but overall the consolidation of servers into the virtual world has been fairly
rapid with many applications making a seamless transition.
The journey to get to cloud computing begins with virtualisation with the cloud OS
providing infrastructure and application services. The infrastructure services are the
ability to virtualise server, storage, and the network. As well as application services
that provide availability and security for the applications that are being utilised in the
cloud environment. VMware’s vSphere satisfies the initial step of virtualisation, the
separation of the hardware and the software. The next step is adding some of the
many cloud applications that include how to do chargebacks and other application
software. These cloud like capabilities include billing for usage, the ability to do self
service, and many others. Charging for consumption, even if it is internal will lead to
better management, with the ability to keep track of what services the consumer is
utilising. In addition, with cloud computing there is the ability to program in more selfservice by the end user in order to keep costs down.
Conclusion
Cloud computing takes virtualisation, which is the separation of the hardware and the
software using virtualisation software such as VMware’s vSphere. Defining the different
types of cloud computing provides us with knowledge as to what cloud computing has
to offer. Whether you are a consumer or producer will define your definition of cloud
computing The public cloud is really geared more for the individual consumer or small
company, while the private cloud is geared more for a medium-to-large company. In
addition, the private cloud is branching out to incorporate the ability to have some
data and applications serviced from the public cloud.
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Learn More
To learn more about how you can improve productivity, enhance efficiency, and
sharpen your competitive edge, check out the following Global Knowledge courses:
VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [v4]
VMware vSphere: Fast Track [v4]
VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting [v4]
Visit www.globalknowledge.net
About the Author
Steve Baca has been working in the Information Technology field for more than 15
years, after graduating from the University of Nebraska wth a Bachelors degree in
Computer Science and Mathematics. After spending time programming and doing
Systems Administration, Steve has been doing technical training for VMware, Sun
Microsystems, and Symantec. In addition to teaching, Steve has also done technical
editing, and wrote the course for Sun Microsystems Network Troubleshooting.
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